Liontrust Sustainable Investment Annual Review 2021 - International - Report - Page 35
2020 priority initiatives
We prioritise a number of proactive engagement initiatives in
collaboration with our Advisory Committee at the beginning of each
year. We assess how our holdings are positioned on these issues
and, where appropriate, define target companies with which we
will engage.
• Increased corporate diversity: We believe companies that are
more diverse are better able to prosper over the long term. We are
engaging companies to encourage greater diversity, looking at
gender balance at Board level and senior positions, and looking
at efforts to reduce any gender pay gaps.
For 2020, we are staying with the same priority initiatives, except for
two changes. First, we decided to step back from our focus on antibribery and corruption in order to better allocate time and resource to
engaging with companies on the climate crisis. Throughout 2019, we
engaged on the climate under the Impact and Sustainable Development
Goals initiative, but this renewed focus will now be executed through
a standalone initiative solely focused on encouraging all portfolio
companies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• Worker well-being: How companies manage the human capital
of their direct operations, as well as workers further down supply
chains, can affect their long-term success. We will engage to
encourage companies to offer decent work and pay living wages
and to ensure they mitigate risks, protect workers’ rights and
maximise the opportunities to support employees. We will also
encourage companies to use their influence to drive forward best
practice further down their supply chains.
In our experience, continued engagement over a longer time period is
more likely to achieve better engagement outcomes than over a oneyear reporting cycle, so we continue with five of our previous priority
initiatives in 2020.
• Encouraging the transition to sustainable investment: Individuals
are having to take responsibility for their long-term finances and
adequate savings and pension provision is critical. To date, the
majority of saving has been into non-sustainable funds but as
demand for sustainable investment grows, companies should do
all they can to promote it. We will focus on determining which are
leading the way and which need to do more.
As well as continuing our efforts to increase corporate disclosure on
ESG impacts, mitigation efforts and performance, our team is now also
focused on delivering improvements in the following priority initiatives:
• One and a Half Degree Transition Challenge: To ensure
companies have strategies to reduce absolute carbon
emissions at a rate consistent with limiting global warming to
1.5 degrees.
• Impact and Sustainable Development Goals: We continue to
prioritise our efforts to quantify the main impacts (good and bad)
from the companies in which we invest. We will engage with
companies to disclose their main impacts so we can report on
these. This is an evolving field and we are keen to build on the
work we have already done in this area.
• Encouraging sustainable use of plastics: We are looking for
companies providing solutions to plastic pollution as potential
investments as well as encouraging companies to reduce the
amount of single use plastics they introduce to the environment.
Liontrust Sustainable Investment: Annual Review 2019 - 35
